*====Updated August 2019=====
Wix still sucks guys!
*====Updated October 2015=====
On October 14, 2015 Search Engine Land wrote an article that Google had dropped Wix.com pages out of their index. Google officially confirmed that they were working on getting Wix sites back into their search engine. And funny enough Google mention the exact same day it was Deprecating their AJAX crawling scheme which is what Wix uses for it’s redirect to Google bots for it’s “SEO” code. So it’s no wonder Wix sites got dropped out of Google’s search.
No surprise, I have been saying Wix is a bad system since 2012 people!
Read my 2016 Wix Review here.
Wix has never been SEO friendly and probably never will be, from Flash to redirecting Google to ajax fragmented pages (so called HTML5 version).
*====Original Post=====
I am seeing more and more people on Wix.com. As a web designer and SEO specialist, I can not stress enough that you are wasting your time and money using Wix.com.
If you are using their domain name with their free account i.e. yourdomain.wix.com why not go with WordPress! You can sign up on wordpress.org and get a free template and use a much more powerful, robust platform for free to promote your website. Best part about wordpress, is it isn’t FLASH! Yes Flash is DEAD, if you are still using flash as a major site functionality you are way behind on the times. Everyone hates the homepage screen that asks if you want to enter the flash site or the html. How about you get a functional site that works for all users. And Wix.com’s patch to offer a free html mirror site along with it’s flash driven main site falls way short.
Yes I know all you free website wanters are saying but its easy. Well wordpress is just as easy! And in the end you get better results and way better search engine visibility out of it. After all isn’t that the purpose of your site, to drive traffic?
To read more about why you should say no to flash read another post I wrote a while back.
*====Updated March 2013=====
Ive been getting Facebook comments saying that this post is invalid, so I would like to update it a little. FYI the original purpose of this post was to state that there are other systems that are better than Wix.com. It wasn’t all about Flash being dead, I point out other things too.
Okay, so Wix offers a non-flash site now. But have you looked at the source code? There is no real code for Google or other search engines to crawl, sure there is a pure HTML version that it sends a search engine bot to, but this isn’t the standard method of searching engine crawling. So I still stand on my word that the Search Engine value of a Wix site still is sub par to all other platforms that write standard HTML as their source code. And the Wix sites that might be ranking high, more than likely no competition for those keywords. For a code evaluation for SEO of Wix.com visit blog my post Wix and SEO.
This biggest factor is they lock you down to their over priced system (high hosting fees). What if you decide to take your nicely designed site you worked weeks putting together and transfer it to a whole new setup on a new hosting company. Last time I checked you can’t do that, you don’t own the ownership of the code(I could be wrong but I think this is how they are setup). For a personal website, the new setup might be okay, but again why not go with WordPress? Open Source framework so you can do what you want with the code and aren’t locked down to an over priced hosting company. As a company using Wix as it’s platform to design websites for clients, NOT a good business decision!
Checkout Kadence Blocks, a very user friendly block system built for WordPress! Ditch that Wix and go WordPress!!
